This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [85]
Here was a thought. Dad and I had lived our lifetimes beneath weather-making mountains, none of which tusked up into storm clouds as mightily as this Sawtooth Range of the Rockies would. In front of us now loomed the reefline of the entire continent, where the surf of weather broke and came flooding across, and both of us knew what could be ahead when full winter poured down off these north peaks. Yet for the instant, to have come upon grandness anywhere near this spavined ranch, neither of us had the heart to care.
Down from the mountains as well, it turned out, this north country stretched as a land of steady expanse, of crisp-margined distances set long and straight on the earth. All the obliques of our valley life seemed to have been erased and redrawn here as ruler-edged plateaus of grassland, furrowed panels of grainfield, arrowing roads, creeks nosing quick and bright from the Rockies. The clean lines of this fresh landscape everywhere declared purpose and capacity, seemed to trumpet: Here are the far bounds, all the extent anyone could need. Now live up to them.
Dad stepped from the pickup, slid his hands into his hip pockets and studied the shards and shields of the Sawtooth Mountains and then the bold-edged distances north and south and east. Dandy country, he said, and turned to grin wide at me. As the fellow says, just dandy fine. Let's go tackle that Lady situation.
Dad by now had learned a considerable trove about how to handle Grandma—the remainder of his problem being that there seemed to be some dozens of troves yet to be figured out about her—and he had hit on what was needed to get her mind off the alarming ranch. We got to figure some place for Ivan to stay for school, Lady. These roads are gonna be too much to drive every day when winter sets in this country. What do ye think we ought to do?
The perpetual problem of basing me somewhere roused her. Well, we ought to go into what's-its-name, Dupuyer, and see what's what, oughtn't we? Criminentlies, that seems to me how to do ... Now she looked Dad full in the face, acknowledging him with challenge. Don't it to you?
It did, and we drove the nine dirt miles north to Dupuyer, luckily a briefer route than the bramble of roads we had come in by from the south. We noticed, with no surprise, that the Jensen ranch looked like an elderly addled cousin of the trim ranches along the way. Then our dirt road at last sneaked itself to the highway, and down from a ridge—this north seemed to be all flat ridgeline where it wasn't iceberg mountains—Dupuyer lay tucked along a broad band of brush which marked its namesake creek.
Off from either side of the highway, which doubled for an instant as the main street, a few dozen houses and buildings lined away, like a Ringling which had been ordered to close in its ranks and paint itself up toward respectability. The first of the town's businesses we came to had one sign advertising it as a gas station, and another declaring it a cafe, as if the enterprise hadn't entirely been able to make up its mind and decided to take on both jobs. While Dad and I searched out someone to put gas in the pickup, Grandma marched into the cafe-sign side of the building and asked the woman behind the counter if she knew anyone who would board a high school boy.
The woman at once plunged into thought, her lips set barely open as if in a soundless whistle. This question from a stranger seemed to have taken her over entirely, until at last she had to shake her head and say, No, just nobody comes to mind. I guess most people aren't willing to take in someone they don't know like that. Grandma locked the woman with her steadfast look: Well, how about you then?
That clamping look and those words began my stay with the Chadwick family. Gertie, the woman of the cafe, said afterward that her agreement came as an out-of-the-clouds hunch which startled her as she said it; after all, she had not laid eyes on me yet. But your grandma just had a way about